Almost every user of an electronic messaging technology has encountered spam messages. Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited messages indiscriminately to multiple end users. The most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, but the term is applied to instant messaging (IM), SMS, MMS, social networking, and other types of messaging.
Some communication networks have a centralized spam agent that tracks spam messages that are transported in the network. End user devices and network nodes (e.g., an email server, SMSC, MMSC) may be programmed to report spam messages to the centralized spam agent. Standards bodies have defined formats for the spam reports. For example, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined a Message Abuse Reporting Format (MARF) for reporting spam to the centralized agent. Similarly, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has suggested a format for reporting spam (“Mobile Spam Reporting Technical Specification”; OMA-TS-SpamRep-V1_0-20100601-D).
Unfortunately, present reporting standards for spam are insufficient, and the centralized agent does not adequately protect the network from spam.